When Shit Hits the Fan What Good Looks Like – Leading, Failing & Evolving - Chris Wahl
In this episode, Johan and Jeffrey sit down with industry legend and long-time community contributor Chris Wahl to explore a career journey that spans from VI admin to independent content creator and platform engineer. Chris shares his unique take on working symbiotically with developers, learning from failures (including a UCS upgrade gone nuclear), and the importance of showing what good looks like rather than just telling.
⏱️ Highlights:
00:37 – Meet Chris Wahl: Blogger, technologist, gamer, legend
03:00 – The IKEA Wheel and unwinding with brutal dungeon games
05:00 – Rapid fire: Terraform, PowerShell, Kubernetes vs vSphere
08:30 – Career evolution: From vSphere to Kubernetes and AWS
12:30 – Drinking from the firehose: Adapting to cloud-native
18:00 – Developers vs IT: Building a real Dev+Platform culture
22:00 – When Shit Hit the Fan: How a UCS upgrade took down a 5,000-person org
30:00 – Chris’s Life Lesson: “Don’t tell people what good looks like—show them.”
👤 Guest:
Chris Wahl
🎮 Bonus: Discover which brutal RPG Chris uses to unwind—and why his kid might be better at Mario Kart than Johan.
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